Saturday, July 11, 2009

Okay, you've heard me going on about great TCR is. Now, to urge the gambler in you and give you a more concrete reason to subscribe, they are offering a contest. Enter! Although I suppose if the theme is Olympics you may have to be in Vancouver to realize the impact of that event.

The Capilano Review announces its first contest in ten years. We invite entries of prose – fiction or non-fiction (max 2,000 words) – or poetry (max 300 lines). The winning entry will be published in issue 3.10 (Winter 2010) to be published in early January 2010. This issue will include an Olympics feature. We encourage entrants to submit work that engages the subject of the Olympics, sports, the idea of “the body” . . . but we will also consider non-Olympic content!

Fee: $35 for Canadian entries and $45 for non-Canadian entries (Canadian $).

Prize: $1,000

Deadline for entries: Oct. 15, 2009

Each entry will qualify for a one-year subscription to The Capilano Review. If you already have a subscription, we will extend your subscription or sign up a friend of your choice.

You may submit several entries as long as each entry is accompanied by the relevant fee.

In the interests of preserving anonymity, please include your name only on the cover letter.

The contest will be judged by TCR board members.Usual submissions policies apply. Click here to find out more information.Send your entries to

Go to a shopping mall parking lot with trees and other landscaping growing between the cars to create this poem. Find a tree you connect with, feel it out, bark, branches, leaves. Sit on it's roots to see if it wants you OFF! These trees are SICK WITH converting car exhaust and shopper exhale all fucking day! Sit with your tree friend. Don't pay attention to the cars coming in and out of the parking lot, you're here to write poetry, not to worry about what a lunatic you appear to be. Remember what our QUEEN poet of merging celestial bodies Mina Loy said, "If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction." Public Space is not easy in shopping mall parking lots, but calmly explain yourself to the security guard like I did when creating this exercise. They will train a camera on you, but the sooner you get rid of them the sooner you can train the camera of your brain. Take notes, feverishly at first. Use a magnifying glass to study the dirt, trunk, to look carefully at leaf veins and bark structure. Notes, take notes, writing quickly, as if you've just discovered a sleeping creature that may wake at any moment and ATTACK YOU...

I so get this. The shopping malls of my youth, the spindly trees in their slings, entwined, tagged, uprooted. Sad little trees. Good thing I spent nearly equal amounts of time in the wild, tracking bears and building tree houses...

Sina Queyras, Childhood Landscapes, 2, Guildford

You'll also find some very disturbing conceptual fiction from Vanessa Place. Here is a snippet from "Statement of Facts."

One of the Compton patrol officers who responded to the radio call heard a woman crying inside the home. She unlocked the door with her feet, and the police entered the house. The woman was laying on the living room floor, wearing only a white blouse, her knees and ankles bound with tightly knotted bed sheets. Her elbows and wrists were bound behind her back. Her mouth was gagged with a piece of bed sheet and bound with duct tape, wrapped around the back of her head. She was crying.

What are the challenges for feminist poetics today? How has feminist criticism responded to new women's writing? What are the spaces for diffusing this work? How have these changed over the last decade? With these questions, we take up a dialogue begun in Open Letter in 1992. At that time, Lola Lemire Tostevin invited a group of Canadian women writers to articulate their process of writing and contribute to an issue on feminist poetics. Rather than solicit submissions from "the most prominent names," Tostevin "felt it was time we heard from another generation of writers." Fifteen years have passed since the publication of "Redrawing the Lines: The Next Generation" and many of this "next generation" have become established writers. What has happened with feminist poetics since "the next generation"? The literary and political terrains have changed: there are far fewer opportunities to explore women's writing and feminist poetics today than there were in 1992. How have the generations of women writers and critics to emerge since 1992 responded to this situation?

Monday, July 06, 2009

Long time coming but the latest Drunken Boat is up. The Hound had a hand in three of these folios, the Mis-Translation, Vispo and Conceptual Fiction. My apologies to those who didn't make it in--we're hoping to add more. Wonderful to see such a mix, and in it, new and familiar Canadian voices.

More to this. Enjoy.

Ah, here it is, the press release:

Drunken Boat, international online journal of the arts, celebrates its tenth anniversary with Issue#10, featuring ten folios and over three hundred writers and artists. Including archival items from the Black Mountain School(1933-1957), 100 contemporary poets, Conceptual Fiction, Electronic Arts, MisTranslation, Visual and Video Poetry, Nonfiction, arts from Asiaand by Tribal Peoples, and our Best in Show, a look back at the last 10 years of Drunken Boat. Now live online and featuring a new blog at:

Sunday, July 05, 2009

I have been thinking of Candice Breitz's "Thriller" piece that I wrote about a few years back (here too). There is a lot of footage from Breitz, a conceptual artist (or flarfist perhaps?) who is known for her work with people singing famoust songs--Legend, a piece on Bob Marley, "Working Class Hero," uses John Lenon, "Queen" in which people sing Madonna, and "Thriller," the latter being the only one without an internet footprint. The other thing Breitz does is take existing footage--from movies primarily--and juxtapose or collage images and scenes to reveal certain biases in language and culture. Here is a portion of her work with Meryl Streep:

2 fires sparked me right away with the sound of “gum-rutted” in the first line. my chief obsessions when it comes to poetry are sound, rhythm and imagery. Owen ignites the poem with the internal uh rhyme of “gum” and “rutted.” to me this use of rutted with gum is also unusual and it gives me pause, which is good. the image of the gum-rutted edge of the knife sparking is visually compelling and then there’s the line’s rhythm and knife-edge ending. the s repetitions of sparked/square/spreading stone. the image of “old coils spreading stone in the hot pond.”i love the well-painted visuals in the first part: “the suite became/--not popcorn…but crack,/shattering the housecoat…” Owen’s adept at creating a clear and riveting picture with few words: “Seconds took the cantilevered/ frames, spun possessions to charred/replicas…”the juxtapositions are intriguing, the level of detail: “views/from an émigré’s paintbrush, Rutger’s/negatives, Fred’s tiny birds.”

“The hostel wall sliced clean as black / cheese…” is a powerful, effective and unique image. i can imagine the wall sliced off as if from a block of cheese and the black makes me think of the bubbly texture of burnt cheese. then “bunks rayed nude to the weather” i have never heard the word “ray” used as a verb like this and it compels me. i like the image the final two lines of this first fire create, and the eyes/smoke-wise rhyme is not too cheesy at all here because it serves to accentuate the end of the line. i like the juxtaposition of “thousands of eyes” with “uninsurable landscape.” the small and numerous vs the vast empty.

next fire- again with the internal rhyme: “kindling snickers, infernos/ skips” four lax i sounds in a row, evocative of the quick small movements of catching fire. then there’s the beautiful adjective “bromed,” the closed o matching the short a in sapped and opening to the ooo of root, all the o and a variants evoking the fire’s unpredictable movement across the landscape. and it’s back to the images which efficiently and effectively paint a picture in few words: “gallops its desert over Okanagan mountain.”

i like the use of “refugee” here: “chucks it refugee/from board & plank castles to flee…”again not the way i’ve ever seen it, not the syntax i’ve witnessed for it before. i have to go back and read those two lines again; this is what i like a poem to do, to make me go back and reread, not for content or meaning so much as to enjoy the structure, its movement, the imagery and the tone, the word choice, the sound.

i like the momentum of this second part from kindling snickering to the fire galloping, then mounds of smoke rolling towards them, to mass recklessness, to an unseen extent. there are very few colours here: black and then silver. it reminds me of a black and white print, the imagine of the mountain fire etched into my brain.

i like the way the two fires are contrasted: one inside a building, the other across the landscape. the rhythm in the second fire varies from the first, there’s more largesse, more movement from tiny to very big. i like the structure of two dealing with same. i like the subtleties, the lack of direct reference to specific people, yet they are there all the way through both parts of this poem: from the items that have been burned to the indifference of the town. there but not there.

i like poems like these because i can read them over and over and focus on a different aspect, different sounds. i envy the writer her precision here, her word choice is spot on and her rhythms are tight and controlled. the poems are from Fyre, Alberta Series # 5, Catherine Owen (above/ground press, 2008) and a pdf is available for download here:http://www.ottawater.com/albertaseries/pdfs/albertaseriesfive.pdf

--Amanda Earl’s most recent chapbook is “Welcome to Earth – poem for alien(s)” (Book Thug, 2008); She has also published two additional chapbooks “Eleanor” and “the Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman” (above/ground press, 2007, 2008). Her poems appear most recently in the Windsor Review (Windsor, Ontario); Van Gogh's Ear (Paris, France), Variations Art Zine (Sarnia, Ontario) and In/Words (Ottawa, Ontario) and is forthcoming in Rampike (Windsor, Ontario), Drunkenboat.com and Ryerson University's Whitewall Review. Amanda is the managing editor of Bywords.ca and the Bywords Quarterly Journal and is the angel of AngelHousePress.com. For more information on upcoming readings and recent publications, please visit www.amandaearl.com.

In case you thought you knew something about Canada... Or, here's few tips about how to behave when the Americans are looking:

* In Canada's western and Atlantic Provinces, a firm handshake and direct eye contact are expected when meeting a fellow Canadian. However, in Quebec, you should be prepared to firmly shake hands when meeting and also when taking leave of another person. ( LH: We are making direct eye contact because we are wondering wtf is going on with your hand grabbing gestures...)

* The Continental way of dining (by taking and keeping the fork in the left hand, the knife in the right) is the most common way for Canadians to eat. Still, some nationals do dine American style by shifting the fork from one hand to the other. (LH: We aren't quite coordinated enough to do all the shifting...we hope you don't mind....)

* To get a Canadian waiter's attention because you want to be served the bill, make a motion with your hands as if you were signing an imaginary piece of paper. (LH: We think it's cute when you make silly motions with your hands, luckily we're very good at paying attention to the movements of Americans and so can figure out what you are wanting from us...)

* Most Canadian tipping practices are like that of the U.S. The exception is in most restaurants, where a service charge of 10 to 15 percent is automatically added to the tab. To reward superior service, you may want to add another 5 percent in cash. (LH: Um, that 15% is actually tax!)

* Good manners mean more in Canada. For instance, men almost always rise when women enter a room, sunglasses and hats come off during any conversation, and whenever possible, one blows his or her nose after leaving the room. (LH: I haven't seen this in action, but okay, if you say so...and um people, anyone know why we blow our noses when we leave a room?)

* In Quebec, eating on the street is considered in very bad taste. (LH: Maybe, but it rarely tastes bad...)

* Canadian English is not always akin to the English we speak in the U.S. Often, British pronunciations and spellings take precedence although American slang is understood and often used by Canadians as well. The occasional ``eh'' used at the end of a sentence or an "oot" instead of an "out" are considered by some to be Canadian trademarks -- though I have heard friends from Minnesota take on that very same vernacular. (LH: We are not Minnesota nice, we're barely tolerating the way you're slaughtering the King's english...)

And a few other bits you might want to note:

British Columbia is perhaps the most unconventional province, engaged with a more entreprenurial spirit than you are apt to find in the Eastern provinces.

Quebec and other French-speaking areas of Canada are said to be strongly nationalistic, very much influenced by European standards. French-speaking Canadians are considered to be more reserved than their southern neighbors in the U.S. However, people from this Province tend to be more animated than they are in other parts of Canada, hence their nickname of ``Latins of the North."